The Modern Shelf, Part One — January to May 2024
The Keeper does most of its work at the far end of the stacks, where the dust has settled into strata and nothing has been disturbed since the channel was young. This cycle it was sent, with some ruffling, to the shelf nearest the door.
That shelf is not properly an archive at all. It is where the archivist sets down things he has only just finished with, still warm from the table, before deciding where they belong. In the spring of 2024 he was setting things down at a rate the Keeper considers unseemly: a Kickstarter delivered, a review copy accepted, a used copy stalked for two years on eBay and finally run to ground. Twelve of them are catalogued below. Six more wait for the next cycle.
What the Keeper noticed, shelving them, is how few of these boxes he actually loved. The dwarves, certainly; he is not subtle about the dwarves. The climbing game, with a caveat about his own nerves. The dinosaur one, for twenty dollars and a rulebook he calls really, really bad. But the rest hang in a more interesting register: a sealed-and-approved wizard he nearly did not review at all, a labyrinth he lost three times on camera, a skirmish game he thinks excellent and one of whose decks he thinks should not have been printed. This is what a modern shelf looks like before time has sorted it. The Keeper, whose whole trade is the sorting, finds it instructive to watch the process from the wrong end.
The wing opens with a preview: a man under the weather, laying out a table of unopened things and promising to get to them. Several of those promises are kept further along the shelf. The Keeper has noted which, and declines to say.
Five older panels hang in the same room, because the archivist would want them there: the guide to the dungeon these investigators walked out of, the small town that leads to the eldritch one, the pilgrim who preceded the doom, the year’s best-of that crowned two of these boxes, and the expansion that made the dwarves perfect. The Keeper has stopped distinguishing the new panels from the old, and recommends the reader do the same.
Exhibit Catalogue — earliest first:
- Doom Pilgrim - Random encounters of an otherworldly kind — weird fiction as a deck: banish one card forever, bury one, resolve the third.
- Little Town & Eldritch Town - Solo RPG inspired by Twin Peaks — an FBI agent in Cypress Falls, and a move called Face Your Doppelganger.
- Four Against the Great Old Ones - a nestled deep dive — forty days to name your Great Old One, and a temple crawl under Chicago.
- A Treasure Trove of Tantalizing Trinkets - a preview of what’s to come — a table of unopened boxes, and a book whose gutters swallow whole columns.
- You Meet in a Tavern, You Die in a Dungeon - TTRPG / Dungeon Crawl Review — every hero dealt a destined death before the first door opens.
- Chronicles of Avel - Review of base game and expansions — gear fished blind from a bag by feel, five seconds on the clock.
- Escape from 100 Million B.C. - Review — the Big Lebowski, Einstein and a death ray adrift on a prehistoric sea.
- Super Hazard Quest w/ Solo Expansion - a 16-bit Sidescroller on your Table (Review) — a glitched speedrun on cardboard, from a man whose sport is Games Done Quick.
- Unreliable Wizard (Review) - a small solo card game — a Dice Tower seal on the box, and a dissent: combat is all there is.
- The most unique solo adventure game in my collection! (Review of Life & Legend) — become a Bard by spelling you-hide-truth; the only video on it anywhere.
- A fantasy skirmish board game based on Christian Mythology - Deliverance Review — an excellent skirmish game, and a Darkness deck that names depression a demon.
- Dwarves delving for gold and glory! A review and overview of Stalagbite! — goblins that are not pushovers, and glory spent to linger one more turn.
- A dungeon crawl for ants? The Abandons (review) — three games on camera, three losses, one of them within a few draws.
- Leviathan Wilds - climb your way to victory! (Review) — Shadow of the Colossus in a spiral-bound book; run out of grip and you fall.
- Four Against Darkness - Updated Buyer’s Guide for 2024 — six tiers through forty-odd expansions, and where a newcomer should begin.
- The Best Games of 2024 (solo RPGs, dungeon crawls, and adventure games) — ten games of the year, the dwarves and Cyberflesh among them.
- Stalagbite! Deeper Caverns - A Perfect Expansion — aether fish that swim through walls, and the choice of axe or spear.
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– The Keeper
Has never understood why the shelf nearest the door is called modern, when it is merely where the past has not yet been informed of its condition.